"As for his medal, it seems a bit melodramatic. He's 5'10" and 245lbs."

"she threatened a fellow officer with scissors and a spray bottle containing a caustic chemical,"

Some of you may remember Carl James from the tape six of the RCSFg series. He was what we then regarded as an ancient 41 years old. Carl served two tours of combat infantry in 'Nam, was a body guard and sparring partner to world boxing champion Alexis Arguello, and was the body guard who saved Larry Flynt's life when his psycho wife went after him with a knife. Also, he worked the door in some of the more dangerous clubs of East Saint Louis. In short, he was a man who had seen something of this world.

I remember that he told me the scariest thing for him was to break up two women fighting. He said they were a combination of pyschol and feline eye scratching/gouging frenzy. I wasn't there, but then neither were you JDN; put scissors in one's hands and a spray bottle with a caustic chemical, and a good hearty tackle seems well within the bounds of reason to me.

It's true, I wasn't there and neither were you or anyone else here. But I'm entitled to my opinion, just like the DA and Judge who weren't there either, nor have they been a police officer nor have they necessarily experienced "dangerous conditions"; but somehow they still make judgments based upon the facts provided. In this matter, their conclusion was no big deal; she pleaded to a misdemeanor (probably she did community service only) - a DUI is far worse. So I truly doubt if Carl James would have called this hospital patient "scary". That said, I have no problem with a "good hearty tackle". It's the medal I was making fun of. Many LAPD Police on a weekly basis face danger far more severe than than an inpatient sick woman who is half their size and still they don't get a medal; they are just doing their job. LAPD, unlike most campus police are professionals.

This guy messed up, big time. Worse, he had a direct order from his superior NOT to use force which he obviously disobeyed and which is even on Video. There is simply no excuse for this guy. He's already cost the school money because of his racist red neck attitude, further this incident will and has already cost the school far more because of his ignorance and incompetence. A private company would have fired him by now. Instead he's home collecting his six figure+ salary PLUS huge benefits watching soaps on TV. God bless government jobs, right?

Many students, lawmakers and even the university's chancellor have called the officers' actions a horrific example of unnecessary force. But some experts on police tactics say, depending on the circumstances, pepper spray can be more effective to de-escalate a tense situation than dragging off protesters or swinging at them with truncheons.

"Between verbalized commands and knock-down, drag-out fights, there's quite a bit of wiggle room," said David Klinger, a former Los Angeles Police Department officer and instructor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who reviewed the pepper spray footage.

Many students, lawmakers and even the university's chancellor have called the officers' actions a horrific example of unnecessary force. But some experts on police tactics say, depending on the circumstances, pepper spray can be more effective to de-escalate a tense situation than dragging off protesters or swinging at them with truncheons.

"Between verbalized commands and knock-down, drag-out fights, there's quite a bit of wiggle room," said David Klinger, a former Los Angeles Police Department officer and instructor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who reviewed the pepper spray footage.

That may well be true, often, if not usually, there is quite a bit of "wiggle room". Frankly, if they met resistance and were told to "drag off the protesters" I can understand the point.

However, in UC Davis situation, a DIRECT ORDER was given to do it peacefully.

"We told the police to remove the tents or the equipment," she told the paper. "We told them very specifically to do it peacefully, and if there were too many of them, not to do it, if the students were aggressive, not to do it." That seems pretty clear; if you meet resistance, you back off, you do not escalate. Further, I think a college campus is different; kid gloves is the norm, not use of force.

I'm interested to see how the LAPD handles the problem this week. It is my understanding that unlike UC Davis, orders are different. They are to clearthe area - period. In general, I am a big fan of LAPD so I anticipate they will handle it professionally and if force is necessary to carry out the mandate to clear the area they will use the minimum force necessary to do so. That may include Pepper Spray.

I understand your point, but LA has a long history of protest tolerance. The causes seem to vary..... Two months ago it was some protest against Thailand. Before that the Philippines. Mexico of course. It's always something. I support free speech, but I wish they would announce it in advance; I could avoid going downtown and the traffic jam.

That said, when given a direct order to clear the area, LAPD CLEARS the area. By whatever means are necessary. Stay tuned...

PS Obviously LAPD in this video was not told to use any force or to take action to clear the intersection (typical in a protest in LA). Unlike some (UC Davis), at least LAPD rank and file know how to obey orders.....

As I said, when LAPD is given a direct order to "clear the area", they CLEAR the area. Nothing ambiguous about it. Their only mistake at MacArthur Park is that they thumped a few Newscasters. They like to think they are exempt.

That said, that was not the order given to UC Davis Campus Police. In fact, the opposite order was given, yet disobeyed. Disciple is important.

I agree; but if she gave the order (see her quote) not to use force then the officer should be toast.

Then again, if it's all BS, and she said "clear them out" period, then frankly, the President should be toast. The officer was just doing his job.

Emails and witnesses should be able to verify the facts.

I look forward to hear how it plays out. I understand former LAPD Chief Bratton (whom I respect very highly) has been retained to do the investigation.It should be fair. If anything, being a former police officer, he is biased in favor of the officer (faculty and students are complaining), but then again, I respect Bratton's objectivity, competency, and honesty.Let the chips fall as they may.

I understand Graham v. Connor, but please remember this is a college campus. I still say that's different. A "soft touch" is the norm.Being "surrounded" even if they were, doesn't count as being "threatened". Just bad tactics; note, no one physically threatened the officer at any time.No one disputes that fact.

I think Bratton will be fair. More important, did the UC Davis President say what she said or didn't she? That is the key. If she did, the officer should be toast. He disobeyed an order. It wasn't his call. If she is lying well, she's out of a job. And should be.

President Obama praised Frank's work on the financial reform legislation.

"This country has never had a Congressman like Barney Frank, and the House of Representatives will not be the same without him," Obama said in a statement. "It is only thanks to his leadership that we were able to pass the most sweeping financial reform in history designed to protect consumers and prevent the kind of excessive risk-taking that led to the financial crisis from ever happening again."

But Frank blames Republicans who controlled the house from 1995 through 2006. Also true. That is what we call RINOs, the go-along crowd. These are liberal policies, but a coalition of Dems and RINOs is a governing majority even when Republicans in name control the House.

Flashback, here is Barney Frank at the end, chair of the committee, hellbent on cutting off Michele Bachmann's questioning of Geithner and Bernancke March 2009 (Rep. Bachmann and the 3 stooges): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SXpGV1HLZk

There is foundation. If you look above GM and I had a long discussion on the proper role of force and police action at UC Davis. Among other issues, I questioned the professionalism and actions ofthe Campus Police (GM defended them) and I commented that I thought/hoped the LAPD would handle the situation here better. In fact the LAPD did handle IMHO the LA situation superbly; a situation much more volatile, dangerous and politically hot than the student protest at UC Davis. Unlike UC Davis campus police, LAPD followed orders; then when ordered to clear the area, solved the problem with minimal use of force. That's how it should be done. That's why I said LAPD did a first class job and linked the LA Times article.

I think GM (although I can't answer for him) and I will both wait until further developments happen in the UC Davis matter beforewe take up this conversation again. Stay tuned! I am glad though the LA situation turned out reasonably well.

"Because uncaring capitalists like you won't shell out for a personal trainer and chef for this poor woman."

GM, You must write from a red state. In the blue states we don't joke about new entitlements. She is already entitled to a free cab ride to her taxpayer paid sex change operation.

**It's more purple now. It's red in the rural areas where people actually do productive things and maintain civilization, where the metro area is filled with illegals and other members of the leech class as cultivated by the dems.

A tornado ran through that town this year still needing cleanup. If she had worked off some of that welfare she would be a much thinner, healthier version of ugly.

Today's column is that Europe is spending too little, but his argument is the same here. A Nobel Laureate (aren't they all?), I don't know what it would take to call him a discredited economist/pundit.

So the next time you hear someone claiming that if we don’t slash spending we’ll turn into Greece, your answer should be that if we do slash spending while the economy is still in a depression, we’ll turn into Europe. In fact, we’re well on our way.

I don't understand why people disrespect the work that most Nobel laureates do.

And I can't, for the life of me, understand why it is impossible to imagine conservatives teaching at top flight universities. For example, I was taught by a economics faculty member with strong ties to the Institute for Humane Studies.

I don't understand why people disrespect the work that most Nobel laureates do.

**Because Buraq the Bloodthirsty and Krugman damage the brand.

And I can't, for the life of me, understand why it is impossible to imagine conservatives teaching at top flight universities. For example, I was taught by a economics faculty member with strong ties to the Institute for Humane Studies.

SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.

“I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”

The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They’ve independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.

“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

“Thus,” they conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past.” Instead of presuming discrimination in science or expecting the sexes to show equal interest in every discipline, the Cornell researchers say, universities should make it easier for women in any field to combine scholarship with family responsibilities.

Can social scientists open up to outsiders’ ideas? Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”

For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse perspectives.” It also made a change on the “Diversity Initiatives” page — a two-letter correction of what it called a grammatical glitch, although others might see it as more of a Freudian slip.

In the old version, the society announced that special funds to pay for travel to the annual meeting were available to students belonging to “underrepresented groups (i.e., ethnic or racial minorities, first-generation college students, individuals with a physical disability, and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered students).”

As Dr. Haidt noted in his speech, the “i.e.” implied that this was the exclusive, sacred list of “underrepresented groups.” The society took his suggestion to substitute “e.g.” — a change that leaves it open to other groups, too. Maybe, someday, even to conservatives.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 10, 2011

Because of an editing error, the Findings column on Tuesday, about political bias among social scientists, omitted the last four words of a sentence that countered the notion that female scientists face discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. The sentence should have read: But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams.

THE LEFT-WING takeover of American universities is an old story. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with "God and Man at Yale," which documented the socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the Ivy League institution he had just graduated from.

Today campus leftism is not merely prevalent. It is radical, aggressive, and deeply intolerant, as another newly minted graduate of another prominent university -- Ben Shapiro of UCLA -- shows in "Brainwashed," a recent bestseller. "Under higher education's facade of objectivity," Shapiro writes, "lies a grave and overpowering bias" -- a charge he backs up with example after freakish example of academics going to ideological extremes.

No surprise, then, that when researchers checked the voter registration of humanities and social science instructors at 19 universities, they discovered a whopping political imbalance. The results, published in The American Enterprise in 2002, made it clear that for all the talk of diversity in higher education, ideological diversity in the modern college faculty is mostly nonexistent.

So, for example, at Cornell, of the 172 faculty members whose party affiliation was recorded, 166 were liberal (Democrats or Greens) and six were conservative (Republicans or Libertarians). At Stanford the liberal-conservative ratio was 151-17. At San Diego State it was 80-11. At SUNY Binghamton, 35-1. At UCLA, 141-9. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, 116-5. Reflecting on these gross disparities, The American Enterprise's editor, Karl Zinsmeister, remarked: "Today's colleges and universities . . . do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America."

At about the same time, a poll of Ivy League professors commissioned by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture found that more than 80 percent of those who voted in 2000 had cast their ballots for Democrat Al Gore while just 9 percent backed Republican George W. Bush. While 64 percent said they were "liberal" or "somewhat liberal," only 6 percent described themselves as "somewhat conservative' -- and none at all as "conservative."

And the evidence continues to mount.

The New York Times reports that a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics shows Democratic professors outnumbering Republicans by at least 7 to 1 in the humanities and social sciences. At Berkeley and Stanford, according to a separate study that included professors of engineering and the hard sciences, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is even more lopsided: 9 to 1.

Such one-party domination of any major institution is problematic in a nation where Republicans and Democrats can be found in roughly equal numbers. In academia it is scandalous. It strangles dissent, suppresses debate, and causes minorities to be discriminated against. It is certainly antithetical to good scholarship. "Any political position that dominates an institution without dissent," writes Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory and director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts, "deteriorates into smugness, complacency, and blindness. ... Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition."

Worse yet, it leads faculty members to abuse their authority. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has just released the results of the first survey to measure student perceptions of faculty partisanship. The ACTA findings are striking. Of 658 students polled at the top 50 US colleges, 49 percent said professors "frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course," 48 percent said some "presentations on political issues seem totally one-sided," and 46 percent said that "professors use the classroom to present their personal political views."

Academic freedom is not only meant to protect professors; it is also supposed to ensure students' right to learn without being molested. When instructors use their classrooms to indoctrinate and propagandize, they cheat those students and betray the academic mission they are entrusted with. That should be intolerable to honest men and women of every stripe -- liberals and conservatives alike.

"If this were a survey of students reporting widespread sexual harassment," says ACTA's president, Anne Neal, "there would be an uproar." That is because universities take sexual harassment seriously. Intellectual harassment, on the other hand -- like the one-party conformity it flows from -- they ignore. Until that changes, the scandal of the campuses will only grow worse.

Bigdog, I am sorry for my ad hominem attack on Nobel prize winners. In the context of all my previous posts, I was only referring to: a) I cannot connect Paul Krugman the columnist with the scholarly work he did previously, b) Al Gore and the IPCC who made wild inflammatory claims not even following their cherry picked data, and c) Pres. Barack Obama after a partial term in the Senate and a minute or two in his job.

These examples devalue IMHO the international gold standard for scholarly work. I appreciate being held to account for my statements that go over the top.

FWIW, I was taught economics by the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson who was also economic adviser to Presidential candidate Sen. Kennedy. He taught us that his answer is the answer. I envy those who had the prominent conservative professors, or those who present more than one viewpoint well, as I assume you strive for in your teaching. I never personally met one.

And for what is worth, I used to ride the elevator with a Nobel Prize winner and a different economist who was an architect of the Reagan economic policy, neither of whom I would call "liberal." Oh, and the professor I took Price Theory with who is an IHS fellow. Damn my liberal, Ivy League-quality education.

And for what is worth, I used to ride the elevator with a Nobel Prize winner and a different economist who was an architect of the Reagan economic policy, neither of whom I would call "liberal." Oh, and the professor I took Price Theory with who is an IHS fellow. Damn my liberal, Ivy League-quality education.

Did they cover what statistical outliers are in that liberal, Ivy League-quality education?

I remember with great fondness my International Relations Prof. William Quandt in 1975, who headed up the mid-east desk at the NSC under Henry Kissinger. I remember him as a man of intellectual integrity. He gave me an A+ for a paper that strongly criticized the then liberal progressive outrage against multinational corporations. Generally he was a great teacher.

I also remember Professor Mansfield. I was the star of the class in the semester on micro-economics. The second semester, using the textbook that the Prof wrote, we covered Macro. The book was strongly Keynesian. In the late 60s due to my strong opposition to the Vietnam War, I imagined myself a leftist, but when confronted with the specious reasoning of Prof. Mansfield's Keynesianism, I realized I was a free marketeer. I sealed my fate with Prof M. one day in class when I doubted his prosletyzation for government guidance of the economy because it would require "sustained intelligence on the part of the government". The wave of snickering across the class had 80-100 people discomfitted him and somehow I went from an "A" in the first semester to a "C" in the second semester.

I also liked my prof for my senior thesis class. We spent a goodly amount of time on Samuel Huntington and Barrington Moore (The Social Origins of dictatorship and democracy) I liked this a lot and found the class stimulating.

OTOH there was Columbia. More tomorrow (if I remember to) including my Con Law class with Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Walter Heller, who I mentioned, was a Keynesian with quite an interesting bio. Later a Ted Kennedy adviser working on national health care and gas rationing in the late 1970s, but I believe he was noticeably to the right of the current writings of Prof. Krugman:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Heller (1915–1987) was a leading American economist of the 1960s, and an influential advisor to President John F. Kennedy as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, 1961-64.

He was a Keynesian who promoted cuts in the marginal federal income tax rates. This tax cut, which was passed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress after Kennedy's death, was credited for boosting the U.S. economy. Heller developed the first "voluntary" wage-price guidelines. When the steel industry failed to follow them, it was publicly attacked by Kennedy and quickly complied. Heller was one of the first to emphasize that tax deductions and tax preferences narrowed the income tax base, thus requiring, for a given amount of revenue, higher marginal tax rates. The historic tax cut and its positive effect on the economy has often been cited as motivation for more recent tax cuts by Republicans.

The day after Kennedy was assassinated, Heller met with President Johnson in the Oval Office. To get the country going again, Heller suggested a major initiative he called the "War on Poverty", which Johnson adopted enthusiastically. Later, when Johnson insisted on escalating the Vietnam War without raising taxes, setting the stage for an inflationary spiral, Heller resigned.

In the early phases of his career, Heller contributed to the creation of the Marshall Plan of 1947, and was instrumental in re-establishing the German currency following World War II, which helped usher an economic boom in West Germany.

Heller was critical of Milton Friedman's followers and labelled them cultish: "Some of them are Friedmanly, some Friedmanian, some Friedmanesque, some Friedmanic and some Friedmaniacs."[1]

Heller joined the University of Minnesota faculty as an associate professor of economics in 1945, left to serve in government, and returned in the 1960s, eventually serving as chair of the Department of Economics. He built it into a top-ranked department with spectacular hires, including Nobel Prize winners Leonid Hurwicz (2008) and Edward C. Prescott (2004).

And for what is worth, I used to ride the elevator with a Nobel Prize winner and a different economist who was an architect of the Reagan economic policy, neither of whom I would call "liberal." Oh, and the professor I took Price Theory with who is an IHS fellow. Damn my liberal, Ivy League-quality education.

Did they cover what statistical outliers are in that liberal, Ivy League-quality education?

Of course they did, GM. If you read closely, I was responding to a particular post that was discussing the absolute absence of conservatives in higher education. I then went on to say "...I can't, for the life of me, understand why it is impossible to imagine conservatives teaching at top flight universities." There was nothing in either of my posts that should indicate to you that I was suggesting a 3-1 conservative to liberal ratio. But, I did illustrate that there is NOT an absolute absence of conservatives teaching in the nation's finest universities.

And, there are conservatives who teach at the nation's finest law schools. The University of Chicago, which is consistently ranked in the top five in the nation, is considered to be a conservative legal education. And John Yoo, who most of have heard of, teaches at UC-Berkeley.

Much has been made lately of those whose income is in the top 1 percent, who supposedly don't pay their "fair share" of taxes. They have been denounced as close to common thieves. But think of the gains that they generate for others. We have rigged our tax policies so that, depending on the year, close to 40 percent of the income tax revenue comes from the 1 percent of the population that controls 20 percent of the wealth.

Close to half the population pays no federal income tax at all. This is a political disaster in the making.

The American economy is currently stagnating for two main reasons. At the top of the system, a relentless program of redistributive taxation undermines incentives for long-term investment and growth.

Yet from this vain pursuit of economic equality, we get declining standards of living for all. Simultaneously on the ground, excessive regulation of labor and real estate markets chokes off growth -- employer by employer and house by house.

Our lopsided structure cannot last. Stock market losses cut the total income of so-called "one percenters" by around 30 percent between 2007 and 2009, with the greatest losses in the top 0.1 percent.

Higher tax rates will drive that overall level of wealth lower still, given that so little government revenue comes from the bottom half of the income distribution. Low tax revenues plus shiny new entitlements create an unsustainable situation where 40 percent of current expenditures are funded by long term debt, on which principal and interest payments will soon come due.

The correct policy flattens the tax rates to boost growth to the top, by leaving more wealth in private hands for intelligent wealth creation. Short-term tax horizons make it difficult for intelligent investors to implement long-term planning, which drives foreign capital from our shores, and sends American capital abroad.

The problem at the top is compounded by a similar paralysis at the bottom. Job creation best occurs in competitive markets. It is hampered when a purported jobs bill starts with "buy American" and "prevailing wage" provisions that pay homage to protectionism and monopoly unions.

Job creation is not helped when the Obama administration takes after Boeing for refusing to build new plants for the benefit of its intransigent unions, and proposes endless changes of national labor law in order to strengthen the hands of unions in organizing drives.

Still more jobs are destroyed by stiffer enforcement of overtime, minimum wage and antidiscrimination laws, all of which nix hiring by cautious employers. The prospect of heavy, but uncertain levies, to fund Obamacare injects yet further caution.

Housing policy is no better. Constant delays on foreclosure keep people in possession of their homes after chronic default imposes a permanent pall over housing markets.

Borrowers with no equity in their home, are more concerned with staving off foreclosure than maintaining their premises. Existing housing stock does not get resold in the market at prices that reflect its present value. Yet further subsidies are channeled via the Federal Housing Administration to perpetuate the cycle of high-risk lending.

All of this must stop if American government hopes to avert the rapid dissipation of human and physical capital. Deregulation has advantages that no system of government subsidies can hope to match.

Dial back on the full-court press against job creation and mortgage foreclosure, and jobs and new construction will follow. But the stagflation will continue so long as unsound regimes of taxation, public expenditure and market regulation place a hobnail boot on the throat of the American economy.

Richard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch professor of law, New York University Law School, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. This piece was adapted from his broadside, "Why Progressive Institutions Are Unsustainable," available from Encounter Books.

Al Gore is giving voice to researchers: "Rob Bauer and Daniel Hann of Maastricht University, and Beiting Cheng, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim of Harvard" and others who found that: "sustainable businesses realize financial benefits such as lower cost of debt and lower capital constraints".

The assumption is that corporate managers otherwise only look to next quarter's earning, all are really Enrons imploding without a new focus. But the great corporations of today already are the ones who perform well year after year and decade after decade by looking our for long term interests.

A Manifesto for Sustainable CapitalismHow businesses can embrace environmental, social and governance metrics.

By AL GORE AND DAVID BLOOD

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the United States was preparing its visionary plan for nurturing democratic capitalism abroad, Gen. Omar Bradley said, "It is time to steer by the stars, and not by the lights of each passing ship." Today, more than 60 years later, that means abandoning short-term economic thinking for "sustainable capitalism."

We are once again facing one of those rare turning points in history when dangerous challenges and limitless opportunities cry out for clear, long-term thinking. The disruptive threats now facing the planet are extraordinary: climate change, water scarcity, poverty, disease, growing income inequality, urbanization, massive economic volatility and more. Businesses cannot be asked to do the job of governments, but companies and investors will ultimately mobilize most of the capital needed to overcome the unprecedented challenges we now face.

Before the crisis and since, we and others have called for a more responsible form of capitalism, what we call sustainable capitalism: a framework that seeks to maximize long-term economic value by reforming markets to address real needs while integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics throughout the decision-making process.

Such sustainable capitalism applies to the entire investment value chain—from entrepreneurial ventures to large public companies, seed-capital providers to institutional investors, employees to CEOs, activists to policy makers. It transcends borders, industries, asset classes and stakeholders.

Those who advocate sustainable capitalism are often challenged to spell out why sustainability adds value. Yet the question that should be asked instead is: "Why does an absence of sustainability not damage companies, investors and society at large?" From BP to Lehman Brothers, there is a long list of examples proving that it does.

Moreover, companies and investors that integrate sustainability into their business practices are finding that it enhances profitability over the longer term. Experience and research show that embracing sustainable capitalism yields four kinds of important benefits for companies:

• Developing sustainable products and services can increase a company's profits, enhance its brand, and improve its competitive positioning, as the market increasingly rewards this behavior.

• Sustainable capitalism can also help companies save money by reducing waste and increasing energy efficiency in the supply chain, and by improving human-capital practices so that retention rates rise and the costs of training new employees decline.

• Third, focusing on ESG metrics allows companies to achieve higher compliance standards and better manage risk since they have a more holistic understanding of the material issues affecting their business.

• Researchers (including Rob Bauer and Daniel Hann of Maastricht University, and Beiting Cheng, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim of Harvard) have found that sustainable businesses realize financial benefits such as lower cost of debt and lower capital constraints.

Sustainable capitalism is also important for investors. Mr. Serafeim and his colleague Robert G. Eccles have shown that sustainable companies outperform their unsustainable peers in the long term. Therefore, investors who identify companies that embed sustainability into their strategies can earn substantial returns, while experiencing low volatility.

Because ESG metrics directly affect companies' long-term value, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, foundations and the like—investors with long-term liabilities—should include these metrics as an essential aspect of valuation and investment strategy. Sustainable capitalism requires investors to be good investors, to fully understand the companies they invest in and to believe in their long-term value and potential.

We recommend five key actions for immediate adoption by companies, investors and others to accelerate the current incremental pace of change to one that matches the urgency of the situation:

• Identify and incorporate risk from stranded assets. "Stranded assets" are those whose value would dramatically change, either positively or negatively, when large externalities are taken into account—for example, by attributing a reasonable price to carbon or water. So long as their true value is ignored, stranded assets have the potential to trigger significant reductions in the long-term value of not just particular companies but entire sectors.

That's exactly what occurred when the true value of subprime mortgages was belatedly recognized and mortgage-backed assets were suddenly repriced. Until there are policies requiring the establishment of a fair price on widely understood externalities, academics and financial professionals should strive to quantify the impact of stranded assets and analyze the subsequent implications for investment opportunities.

• Mandate integrated reporting. Despite an increase in the volume and frequency of information made available by companies, access to more data for public equity investors has not necessarily translated into more comprehensive insight into companies. Integrated reporting addresses this problem by encouraging companies to integrate both their financial and ESG performance into one report that includes only the most salient or material metrics.

This enables companies and investors to make better resource-allocation decisions by seeing how ESG performance contributes to sustainable, long-term value creation. While voluntary integrated reporting is gaining momentum, it must be mandated by appropriate agencies such as stock exchanges and securities regulators in order to ensure swift and broad adoption.

• End the default practice of issuing quarterly earnings guidance. The quarterly calendar frequently incentivizes executives to manage for the short-term. It also encourages some investors to overemphasize the significance of these measures at the expense of longer-term, more meaningful measures of sustainable value creation. Ending this practice in favor of companies' issuing guidance only as they deem appropriate (if at all) would encourage a longer-term view of the business.

• Align compensation structures with long-term sustainable performance. Most existing compensation schemes emphasize short-term actions and fail to hold asset managers and corporate executives accountable for the ramifications of their decisions over the long-term. Instead, financial rewards should be paid out over the period during which these results are realized and compensation should be linked to fundamental drivers of long-term value, employing rolling multiyear milestones for performance evaluation.

• Incentivize long-term investing with loyalty-driven securities. The dominance of short-termism in the market fosters general market instability and undermines the efforts of executives seeking long-term value creation. The common argument that more liquidity is always better for markets is based on long-discredited elements of the now-obsolete "standard model" of economics, including the illusion of perfect information and the assumption that markets tend toward equilibrium.

To push against this short-termism, companies could issue securities that offer investors financial rewards for holding onto shares for a certain number of years. This would attract long-term investors with patient capital and would facilitate both long-term value creation in companies and stability in financial markets.

Ben Franklin famously said, "You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again." Today we have an opportunity to steer by the stars and once again rebuild for the long-term. Sustainable capitalism will create opportunities and rewards, but it will also mean challenging the pernicious orthodoxy of short-termism. As we face an inflection point in the global economy and the global environment, the imperative for change has never been greater.

Mr. Gore, chairman of Generation Investment Management, is a former vice president of the United States. Mr. Blood is managing partner of Generation Investment Management.

Leadership: Europe's outpouring of grief over the death of Vaclav Havel, hero of Czechoslovakia's great Velvet Revolution, says much about its longing for more like him. His honesty and courage liberated Europe.

Some 75,000 Czechs bearing roses and candles lined up in Wenceslas Square beginning Sunday, as they once did in 1989, to pay tribute to one of the greatest freedom fighters of the 20th century. Havel died Sunday at age 75 after liberating his country, leading his nation as president from 1989-2003, and voicing his moral authority to scourge lingering tyrants in Cuba, Burma and China.

Havel, a playwright whose health had been weakened by years spent in communist dungeons, was an unlikely and yet perfect leader for leading Eastern Europe's liberation from communism. He unshackled Europe with the only weapon in his arsenal — words, which he animated and empowered by expressing them truthfully.

In the former Czechoslovakia, the nightmare of communism imposed after World War II was employed with a Nazi-like oppressive intensity, leaving a bleak society whose citizens got by on lies, collaboration, mediocrity and ratlike survival ethics.

"We live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions. ... Only a few of us were able to cry out loud that the powers that be should not be all-powerful," Havel told his nation after being elected the first president of the restored democracy in December 1989.

Condemned from birth as a "bourgeois element," Havel was always an outsider who could never become a "new communist man" or a cog in the machine of "progress." Denied admission to university, denied jobs, denied permission to leave the country, spied on by secret police and refused liberty in prison beginning in 1979, he managed to free his country by standing up for freedom against all odds.

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It was an incredible dream then — because right up until the end, no one believed communism would ever fall. Havel's Velvet Revolution changed that, as first a few thousand, and then a few hundred thousand flooded the streets calling for the regime's end — and the move spread like wildfire through Europe and eventually hit the gates of Moscow.

Havel's peaceful revolution, unlike almost any other, left all oppressive regimes — to this very day — uncertain about their self-declared permanence.

All the same, the sorry imitations now seen in Egypt and Libya and other places leave people skeptical. That's because they aren't animated by the classical concepts of liberty and human rights that Havel's truth was.

First, his plays pointed out the rampant dishonesty, collaboration and conformity of society under communism and enraged the regime for that alone. Then in 1976, motivated by the regime's arrest of a psychedelic rock band called "Plastic People of the Universe," he initiated the first call for political freedom through his Charter 77, a manifesto for liberty on classical principles. He got 242 others to sign it — only a few years after Soviet tanks crushed Czechoslovakia's freedom fighters in a bloody 1968 invasion.

And yet, Havel himself said that standing up for freedom was the only choice.

"Humanity will pay the price for communism until such a time as we learn to stand up to it with all political responsibility and decisiveness," he said, encouraging a group of Cuban civil society organizers in 2006.

Havel not only articulated the corrosive effect of communism on the human soul as few others did, he also warned the West to defend its liberties and free markets.

Guys all think they are experts on discerning real from fake. Those for sure are enhanced; some kind of hormone treatment. I hesitate to ponder whether the package came with the plumbing conversion. I never understood why 'ordinary' gays want to be associated with all the iterations of the LGBT movement. Are they still a gay couple if his lover really wants him to be a woman?

I wonder what the media attacks would be if Sarah Palin wore that blouse in congressional testimony with breasts exposed while everyone else was in a business suit.